The Best Free Mint Alternative After Mint Shut Down

What Happened to Mint (and Why Credit Karma Isn't a Replacement)

Intuit shut Mint down in March 2024. The official migration path was Credit Karma, but Credit Karma is a credit-monitoring tool that earns revenue by recommending financial products to you. It doesn't have budgets. It doesn't categorize your spending. It doesn't track your net worth over time.

That left millions of people without the tool they'd used for years, often since college. Some switched to YNAB or Monarch. Many just… stopped budgeting. The problem is that most alternatives that surfaced in 2024 cost $100+/year, which feels wrong when Mint was free.

A real Mint replacement needs to do four things: pull all your accounts into one place through bank sync, auto-categorize transactions, show you where your money is going, and have a free tier that isn't a joke. Credit Karma does zero of those four things.

Sable vs. Mint — An Honest Comparison

Let's be real: Mint had a decade head start and tens of millions of users. Sable is newer and smaller. But Mint is also gone, so the comparison is really about what Sable does versus what you remember Mint doing.

• Bank sync: Sable connects through Plaid, same as Mint did. Auto-categorization, automatic transaction pulls, the whole deal.
• Free tier: Sable's Solo plan is genuinely free — 2 bank accounts, unlimited budgets and goals, rollover, all reports. No credit card required, no 14-day trial that locks you out.
• Net worth tracking: Included in the free plan.
• Ads and data sales: Mint made money partly through "personalized offers" — basically selling your attention to financial product companies. Sable never sells your data. Period.
• Canada support: Mint was US-only for most of its life. Sable supports both US and Canadian banks.

Where Sable falls short compared to what Mint was: Sable doesn't have an Android app yet (web and iOS only right now), and it's a smaller company without the brand recognition Mint had. If community size matters to you, that's a real difference.

What Sable Does Differently

Beyond matching Mint's core features, Sable has a few things Mint never offered:

• Rollover budgets: Underspend in a category this month? It rolls forward. Mint didn't do this natively.
• USD + CAD support: If you bank in both countries (dual citizens, cross-border workers, snowbirds), Sable handles both. Most US budgeting apps simply don't.
• 20% of profits go to charity: Built into the business model, not a marketing stunt.
• Privacy-first: No data sales, no "personalized financial offers." Your data stays yours.
• BDS tracker and Zakat calculator: Islamic finance features like a boycott tracker and Zakat calculation aren't available anywhere else in a budgeting app.
• Household sharing: The Ultra plan ($9/mo or $99/yr) adds sharing for couples and families — something Mint only half-supported.

The paid tiers are optional. The Special plan at $5/mo ($55/yr) unlocks unlimited bank connections and priority support. But the free plan isn't crippled — it's a real budgeting tool.

How to Switch from Mint (or Credit Karma) to Sable

If you exported your Mint data before the shutdown (or still have access through Credit Karma's transaction history), here's how to move:

1. Export your data: Download your transaction history as CSV from Credit Karma or wherever you saved your Mint export.
2. Sign up for Sable: The free Solo plan doesn't require a credit card. Takes about 2 minutes.
3. Connect your banks: Plaid handles the connections. Most US and Canadian banks are supported.
4. Import your history: Upload your CSV so your past spending data carries over.
5. Set up budgets: Sable's categories are customizable. Spend a few minutes setting monthly targets that make sense for you.

The whole process takes under 10 minutes. You won't get Mint's years of historical graphs back exactly as they were, but your transaction data will be there.

When Credit Karma Might Actually Be Enough

Honesty time: if you never really used Mint for budgeting — if you mostly just checked your credit score and glanced at your account balances — then Credit Karma is probably fine for you. It does credit monitoring well.

You don't need Sable (or any budgeting app) if:

• You only used Mint to check your credit score
• You don't set spending categories or monthly budgets
• You're happy eyeballing your bank app balances
• You don't need to track net worth or spending trends over time

But if you actually budgeted in Mint — set categories, checked where you overspent, tracked goals — then Credit Karma is a downgrade, not a replacement. That's where a dedicated budgeting tool makes sense.